Europe Protected the Yarn and Lost the Lactam

Brussels spent the summer protecting Europe's nylon spinners.

On July 27 the Commission put definitive antidumping duties of 60 to 67.6 percent on polyamide yarn from China, in defence of an industry it described as 2,000 people across Croatia, Italy, Spain, Romania and Slovenia, selling into a market worth about EUR 400 million a year.

Six weeks later, the German plant that makes the raw material those spinners run on said it is stopping.

"Who supplies the spinners Brussels just protected?"

Leuna Polyamid's managing director, Martin Naundorf, told German press on September 8 that no binding offer from an investor had arrived. Production runs to the end of September to work off the order book.

Then a controlled shutdown of 15 to 20 days, formal insolvency proceedings expected to open in early October, and months of decontamination after that.

About 400 people lose their jobs. Saxony-Anhalt is roughly EUR 79.5 million into keeping the site running, and gets very little of it back.

What Actually Comes Out of Leuna

The tonnage that matters is 176,000 tonnes a year of caprolactam, which is what DOMO put on the record in March 2022 when the site made its five millionth tonne.

That release carries the other detail worth holding onto. The plant was commissioned in 1942 and was the world's first industrial-scale caprolactam production, and DOMO bought it in 1994.

The first caprolactam plant ever built goes cold in about eleven days.

The Leuna chain runs benzene into cumene, cumene into phenol, phenol into cyclohexanone, cyclohexanone into caprolactam, and caprolactam into polyamide 6 on site. Acetone, sulfuric acid and ammonium sulfate come off the same chain.

So one announcement subtracts four positions at once:

• 176,000 tonnes of caprolactam, and the polyamide 6 polymerisation behind it.
• A cyclohexanone position, the swing intermediate between the phenol route and the cyclohexane route to lactam.
• A phenol and acetone position. We went through Gladbeck on August 5, where a European phenol plant got a closure notice and then did not actually close. Leuna is the version that closes, though no Leuna phenol nameplate is on the public record, so carry the tonnage as unquantified.
• The benzene offtake underneath all of it.

That last one is where it gets interesting, because it runs outward instead of downstream. TotalEnergies' Mitteldeutschland refinery built a EUR 60 million benzene extraction scheme with DOMO, commissioned in early 2018, feeding a 1.6 kilometre pipeline into the site.

The refinery now needs a new home for that benzene cut, and Linde's gas supply into the site changes shape.

Then there is the part nobody buys or sells. The ammonia unloading station, the tank farm and the pipeline network that other chemical park operators use all sit on an asset heading into deconstruction.